An unusual wasp

Here’s why I love the internet. Within 24 hours of tweeting a new photo of an odd Australian wasp, I received this tweet back from the fine folks at the NCSU insect museum:

I emailed chrysidid expert Lynn Kimsey, a friend from my grad school days back at U.C. Davis. I hadn’t recognized the wasp as a chrysidid- it’s that weird! Lynn replied almost immediately:

OMG!!! I’m currently revising this genus – Loboscelidia. I’ve never seen them alive. We have no idea how they make a living except for one obscure reference to rearing one from a walking stick egg. Do you have any other photos of it??? This is a male.

Awesome. Seriously, awesome.

Twitter got the wasp in front of the right set of eyeballs within a day after I posted the photo. Now we not only know what the insect is, but we know- after some additional sleuthing- these may be the only live photographs ever taken of this species, genus, and subfamily. A Myrmecos exclusive!

Here are a few more:

Loboscelidia sp.Loboscelidia sp.

To make my life complete, now I just need instant image-processing and tweeting capabilities from remote tropical jungles. Had I known in the field that this bizarre animal was a rare and potentially valuable discovery, I would have devoted more than two minutes to it.

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34 thoughts on “An unusual wasp”

See, not *everything* in Australia will kill you. Some of them will make you famous in the process.

(Oh, and even without being amazingly rare, that is a wonderful photograph. Might I strongly recommend getting in touch with the big newspapers – the Brisbane Times and the Australian – and writing them a piece about it).

Love it, man. The only reason I recognized that wasp is that I collected one in Cape Trib a few years ago in a Malaise trap. That, and I happen to be close friends with one of the only diapriid experts in the world! (AND I am a blog/twitter/rest-of-the-internet junkie). Thanks for exposing your images to the masses despite the subsequent and rampant pilfering. It means that the thousands of us who love nature get to share in your natural history moments.

Ok, this is tremendously cool. The perfect antidote for the sort of day when I begin to be convinced that the internet, and its associated political commentary, will be the end of civilization. This is the good. This is the usefulness.

The occipital area looks so weird, like someone stuck the head onto a blob of glue! I checked out a specimen of Loboscelidia rufa (det. by Lynn Kimsey, of course) and the structure covers the neck, providing some protection. It’s dangerous for a cuckoo wasp to be discovered.

Alex, I’m so happy to see this. And not just because I’m newly appointed to the NC State humanities faculty. Turns out that the Insect Museum was targeted in the Coburn/McCain report as a stimulus fund boondoggle – for a very modest NSF grant – solely because they are called a museum yet get very few visitors (project 68, pg 37 of ;this PDF). What pols don’t understand is that this repository is not designed to host thousands of visitors but rather to serve as a resource for international science, just as they have done here. The museum also does terrific outreach to the public, participating in the annual BugFest celebration (attendance ~35,000) in our capital city each year, educating the public about the importance of insects in everyday life.

Thank you so much for highlighting the contribution of our superb colleagues at NC State.

And just to keep the social media ball rolling, I sent this url to our hymenopterist. Turns out he has a series of Loboscelidiinae in our unidentified Hymenoptera backlog and he will contact Lynn to see if she is interested. As he says “They totally puzzled me, and I was greatly surprised to when they keyed to cuckoo wasps.”

Also: Thanks for finally (albeit unknowingly at first) posting pictures of a chrysidid! Although I would still have to nag about more.. in which case Chrysidinae (or possibly Cleptinae) is as much I dear hope for 😉

Love this! (and all your stuff). I had a similar awesome consequence of uploading an image to BugGuide.net. An entomologist identified the insect as not a new or rare species but unknown in these parts. My joke about it: I took the pic in Golden Gate Park, so it was probably just a tourist.

People reading this blog post on the value of social media in science might also be interested to check out Project Noah .

Anybody with a camera (digital, at least) can participate by posting their sightings. It isn’t always trained scientists holding the cameras, but an unusual organism doesn’t care who takes the picture. Smartphones make it even easier. Project Noah has an app.